Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By : Greg Gifford, Jason Hanshaw
Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By: Greg Gifford, Jason Hanshaw

Overview of this book

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) allows you to use multiple channels and tools to create a 1:1 marketing experience for your customers and subscribers. Through automation and helper tasks, you can greatly increase your productivity while also reducing the level of effort required in terms of volume and frequency. Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud starts by discussing what automation is generally and then progresses to what automation is in SFMC. After that, you’ll focus on how to perform automation inside of SFMC all the way to fully running processes and capabilities from an external service. Later chapters explore the benefits and capabilities of automation and having an automation mindset both within and outside of SFMC. Equipped with this knowledge and example code, you'll be prepared to maximize your SFMC efficiency. By the end of this Salesforce book, you’ll have the skills you need to build automation both inside and outside of SFMC, along with the knowledge for using the platform optimally.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Automation Theory and Automations in SFMC
5
Section 2: Optimizing Automation inside of SFMC
11
Section 3: Optimizing the Automation of SFMC from External Sources
17
Section 4: Conclusion

The REST and SOAP APIs

Some of the Marketing Cloud developers that have been in the platform for many years may remember that there was a third option for API in Marketing Cloud – XML. Now, rightly so, when we say that, you should shudder with horror as it was not only one of the most antiquated and overly complex API types, but it was, by far, a security nightmare. Thankfully, this option has been retired and is no longer an option.

Now, we are left with just two different types of API in Marketing Cloud – SOAP and REST. Let's take a moment to introduce what each is. Note that we will only be going over how it relates to Marketing Cloud via the HTTP protocol – there is a lot beyond what each type can do:

  • SOAP API: SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol, which is a messaging standard protocol system. SOAP utilizes XML to declare its messages and relies on XML schemas and other technologies concerning structure.
  • REST API: REST stands for...